Hybrid Cloud Computing with Windows Server and System Center

Over the past 15 months, we’ve delivered 3 waves of industry leading datacenter innovations with System Center 2012, Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1. With these three releases, we have established a solid foundation for our enterprise and service provider customers to cloud-optimize their business. This week at TechEd, we announced a refresh of our key private and hybrid cloud solutions with Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, as well as new offerings including the Windows Azure Pack (formerly known as Windows Azure Services for Windows Server), Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager and Windows Azure Backup.

Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, which are in Preview today, along with these other new offerings, provide a great foundation for our customers to deliver high-performance, elastic and always-on private and hybrid cloud services to the application owners. We know that many enterprises and service providers who have been considering a cloud infrastructure, have had challenges with integrating the solution elements while still meeting their business and technical requirements. Many of them told us that what they were really looking for was the ability to deploy, manage and consume a cloud infrastructure in such a way that it would offer agility and efficiency benefits similar to what Microsoft derives by operating its large scale cloud services with Windows Azure.

Specifically, customers asked for a robust virtualization platform, high performance, lower-cost storage, and flexible networking options. Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 deliver a cloud and datacenter infrastructure that allows you to virtualize even the largest workloads, provides easy capacity expansion on industry-standard hardware at a fraction of the cost of other solutions, and offers a complete software-defined networking solution out-of-the-box to seamlessly bridge physical and virtual datacenters.

Customers also asked for high performance replication and reduced failover complexity to increase uptime for their workloads. Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 deliver hybrid cloud business continuity solutions spanning on-premises and the cloud, which enable robust and affordable, at-scale recovery options to better protect against service outages.

In terms of service delivery, customers asked for more flexibility in composing services and offerings, as well as efficient administration and integration with their existing ecosystem and business assets. Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 offer you faster time to value by simplifying the provisioning, delivery and operations of multi-tenant IT services, and let you benefit from consistent management experiences and services across hybrid clouds.

And to help them better manage their applications, customers told us they wanted comprehensive tools to diagnose and fix application-level problems. System Center 2012 R2 offers deep application and transaction monitoring insight for .NET and Java applications to maximize their availability and performance, combined with the ability to identify remediation measures when needed.

To sum up, with Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 we are delivering an end-to-end cloud infrastructure and management solution for self-service delivery of multi-tenant cloud services that is enterprise-class in every aspect, simple and cost-effective to deploy and focused on applications – your applications, delivered on your terms from your corporate datacenter, from the cloud or in a hybrid cloud model.

Visit our website to learn more about the new and exciting capabilities in Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2. And while you are there, don’t forget to sign up for the product evaluation so you are notified when the Preview bits become available.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be diving much deeper into these two new products and other offerings from Microsoft, giving you much more insight into how you can transform your datacenter and cloud optimize your business. So make sure you’ll check back on this site frequently!